CG ... Part Deux
After reading some of the fine comments left on the previous post (hey, this comments thing is pretty neat) I would like to clarify the following.
I was speaking generally of live action films with CG elements, or at least movies that could have incorporated live action, like real actors in the Final Fantasy movie. I understand that Pixar evokes intense emotional depth in their films, but they are also entirely CG and aside from using stop motion toys, live fish in a fish tank, or actual monsters, their films use CG to create environments and characters that are best served in a CG world. And yes, the Incredibles were people ... but it was just too cool of a style choice. =)
From commercials to kids shows the movie going audience is inundated with computer generated images. And while sometimes it is difficult to tell what is CG and what isn't, people can tell on a base level when too much is enough.
I'll get into the whole "Pixar vs. the World" thing later. ;)
I was speaking generally of live action films with CG elements, or at least movies that could have incorporated live action, like real actors in the Final Fantasy movie. I understand that Pixar evokes intense emotional depth in their films, but they are also entirely CG and aside from using stop motion toys, live fish in a fish tank, or actual monsters, their films use CG to create environments and characters that are best served in a CG world. And yes, the Incredibles were people ... but it was just too cool of a style choice. =)
From commercials to kids shows the movie going audience is inundated with computer generated images. And while sometimes it is difficult to tell what is CG and what isn't, people can tell on a base level when too much is enough.
I'll get into the whole "Pixar vs. the World" thing later. ;)
posted by InkTank at
3:03 AM
8 Comments:
I agree that CG for the sake of CG is, in a general sense, at best not noticeable but at worst distracting.
That said it is definitely here to stay. While there will always be 100% non-CG cinema (and no doubt labeled as such) the presence of newer and newer digital technology on film and everything that surrounds it are not going to stop.
Hollywood ultimately is run as a profit machine. Profit equals income minus outgo. With income no longer increasing as quickly, if at all, Hollywood will look to minimize outgo. One way to do that is with CG. Get lesser known or newer actors and put them in a largely CG world and you save many millions of dollars. The CG world is always there, always perfectly lit and never has accidental pedestrians wandering through to screw up the shot.
The cost of CG, like all technology, continues to drop whilst continuing to add new features. The average person can buy a digital video camera for a few hundered bucks, go home and sit down in front of their $500 Mac mini, fire up iMovie and bang-zoom be monkeying around with digital movie making.
Granted iMovie is a limited use package but the point of the anecdote is that with that kind of ability now in the hands of anyone with a thousand or so dollars to spend the kind of power available to a studio with a million or so dollars is staggering compared to even a few years ago.
One more analogy: I think it is like when desktop publishing first became a phenomenon. Prior to the advent of that technology publishing was generally handled by large companies with huge investments in very specialized equipment. Those organization had some software and tools but they were very expensive and specific to the systems they worked with.
The average person could self-publish by LITERALLY cutting and pasting physically printed pages into the desired shapes, drop in cut out pictures and then photocopy the result. For a larger run you could have then printed using an offset process.
When Aldus Pagemaker came on the scene and laser printers entered the realm of everyday usage for us common folk there was an explosion of usage. Finally you could have the kind of control over your publishing that used to be the sole province of larger organizations.
The upshot of this, however, was that people said "Ooo - FONTS" and produced garish, teeth-jarring layouts replete with mismatched fonts, headache inducing patterened backgrounds, etc., not to mention that the journalistic bent of some users ran into bizarre areas that normally would have been safe from wide distribution (not unlike blogging ;-) )
Eventually this settled out and people realized how ineffective this wide-openness was and they went back to tried and true publishing standards (such as sans serif fonts for titles, serif for body, etc.). The exact same thing happened with web site publishing (and still does, actually - thanks FrontPage, NOT).
I think the same thing will happen with CG in cinema. This initial period where the price has dropped enough to put it in reach of more film-makers is going to produce a lot of CG for the sake of CG, often at the expense of the story and experience. It will then settle out and not even be a subject to be discussed, except in an historical perspective.
I think with a more expierenced directer at the helm of Sky Captain, it could have been a lot better. But, that movie was just the one man's vision. While not the greatest movie ever, if another director had directed it would have lost some of it's Flash Gordon type charm I think.
I agree with both of you guys. I think we are just emerging from the "Ohhh, fonts!" realm of CG work. But as I said, it is a great tool, if used properly. To enhance story and cinema and not to just ... be.
And yea TOnz, I was actually looking forward to Sky Captain ... but while visually interesting it just didn't hold together well for me.
But then again, there are plenty of non CG movies that just fall apart as well. =)
Good points. The CG in Sin City was really there to make sure nothing detracted from the characters in the story--no anachronisms, nothing out of place. Yes, the cars were cool and so were the settings, but the movie lived and died by the acting and dialogue. It would have been engaging if all the action had taken place on a bare stage. (cf., the jail scene, where all the acting takes place in a room less than 10' square, no sfx needed.)
Um, I liked Sky Captain... *blush*
Oh, and nicely written. ;) I love reading your writing, no matter what form it takes.
Sin City is one of the best movies of all time.
It's just brilliantly done.
Along with batman begins really.
About Pixar, I believe that you were making a comment about the "realness" vs the "fakeness" of CG. As in, in movies where things are meant to be real, CG makes things not real. (I.e. "Star Wars" vs "Lord of the Rings"
Pixar is cartoons, which is a style entirely removed from "reality", therefore does not need to worry about this problem.
Could you please put angst technologies back. I work at a school district in technology and they were the funniest things because so much of it was true. We really want our server in a frozen climate.
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